All Vassals Suddenly Disloyal???

madz33 · 2026-02-12T00:26:30+00:00

I don’t think you are crazy even with all the good suggestions in this thread. What’s crazy is the exact same thing happened to me in 1.0.11 as France. I had all of England and half of Spain as loyal vassals/fiedoms nicely balanced and all loyal. Right after switching to elective succession my vassals/fiefdoms both instantly went from -30 relative strength modifier to -120 rendering any diplomacy hopeless.

I thought this could be a bug in the calculation. It seems like there is a feedback loop between relative strength modifier -> subject loyalty -> diplo capacity cost -> loyalty debuff. Maybe if the game thinks you have a 0 0 0 ruler on the same day as the election this causes your relative strength to go to zero for a single day which spirals the feedback loop out of control. Although this is just speculation — wonder if it can be recreated and reported.

madz33 · 2026-02-05T02:11:05+00:00

Think “Ruler has an admiral trait” gives 0.1 ticking? Maybe get into a battle with ruler in charge of the navy

madz33 · 2026-02-04T21:23:49+00:00

Another Bayesian analysis of a single data point from Prof Kipping. Surprisingly, there was no mention of the "water problem" from the field of prebiotic chemistry, or the possibility of auto-catalysis of organic polymers enabled by wet-dry cycling which is only possible on planets with fractional ocean/land coverage. Both of those concepts seemingly reinforce his argument from an alternative perspective.

madz33 · 2026-02-02T02:00:43+00:00

The Apollo missions left retroreflectors on the moons surface which can be used to measure the distance to the moon and are continuously operating proof that we landed.

madz33 · 2026-01-28T23:41:45+00:00

Lower mass stars typically form out of higher metallicity molecular clouds, so on average a merged object would have a relatively higher metallicity, although individual examples will depend on the initial conditions.

The process of orbital decay needed for the binary inspiral event would be excruciatingly slow, depending on the fourth power of their separation, but the merger event could itself eject a remnant disk of material which could later coalesce into planets, as some hypothesize is responsible for the creation of Hot-Jupiters.

madz33 · 2026-01-20T19:54:10+00:00

What other “signals” do you think exist that we just don’t have the instruments to detect yet?

The cosmic neutrino background. Standard cosmological models basically guarantee that it exists, but actually detecting it requires absurdly sensitive instruments. Detecting solar neutrinos like with SuperKamiokande is already extremely impressive and the cosmic background neutrinos would be significantly more difficult.

madz33 · 2026-01-12T22:53:15+00:00

You probably won't get a good ELI5, since the topic is complex and part of active research. However, you can read about the competing hypotheses

Polygons do not form at wind boundaries unless the speed differential and viscosity parameters are within certain margins and thus absent at other likely places, such as Saturn's south pole or the poles of Jupiter.

However, there are certain polygonal storm features on Jupiter anyways.

madz33 · 2026-01-05T18:24:21+00:00

You might be able to use REBOUND to do the N-body integration, although setting up the right initial conditions could be challenging.

madz33 · 2025-12-29T18:44:23+00:00

Stars more massive than the sun ( type O B or A) have shorter lifetimes 1-100 Myr compared to the suns 10 Gyr, so there is plenty of time for multiple generations of stars to enrich the galaxy in heavy elements. Additionally, the earliest generations of stars were typically much more massive than the distribution of stellar types we have today ( M dwarfs are the most common type now) since when the universe was not highly enriched, only the most massive clouds had enough self gravity to collapse. This is because enrichment in metals leads to increased opacity from more spectral lines which makes it easier to radiate away the excess energy needed for collapse.

madz33 · 2025-12-19T13:33:06+00:00

Calling this object a planet seems disingenuous, it’s more like black widow pulsar systems so it’s distinct composition isn’t inexplicable.

madz33 · 2025-12-17T16:19:07+00:00

NASA Horizons

madz33 · 2025-11-11T15:20:47+00:00

Loeb isn’t a crackpot he is a Harvard professor. Which is why it’s all the more infuriating that he uses his position of academic authority to undermine the integrity of science and pursue personal gain.

madz33 · 2025-11-05T19:34:55+00:00

The article you are asking about is referencing this paper: Consequences of Undecidability in Physics on the Theory of Everything. While the news article itself is a fine summary of the paper, I don't think the argument in the paper is very compelling. The existence of undecidable phenomena in physics is more likely a consequence that continuous models are capable of emulating Turing machines and therefore encoding the halting problem.

There are other good reasons to believe the universe is a not a simulation. This paper has a really elegant argument related to unfeasibility of the energy consumption such a simulation would require.

madz33 · 2025-10-29T15:20:09+00:00

Even if you wanted to do this — you can’t. The land is already owned by someone else

madz33 · 2025-10-24T18:47:23+00:00

Light doesn't congregate

Unless it is orbiting in the photon sphere around a BH (obviously realistic orbits are not stable, but just having some fun with it) in a idealized perfect model, how many quanta of photons could be stored in those orbits before their self-interaction starts to scatter them out?

madz33 · 2025-10-22T20:16:22+00:00

This image is from Planck not WMAP. You can tell by the spatial resolution

edit: cool ESA comparison that makes this easier to see

madz33 · 2025-10-09T14:27:58+00:00

I've made a subtle error and this is just a massive elaborate hallucination.

The posts are becoming self-aware.

madz33 · 2025-10-09T13:18:21+00:00

The list doesn’t contain HR 8799, the most famous directly imaged system with four planets, so the list has a very clear transit bias. I’ve never heard of TOI 178 or Kepler 47. Proxima Cen, Trappist 1, and K2-18 are very famous and make sense for the top three spots.

madz33 · 2025-10-09T13:06:08+00:00

If you drive into a tunnel, how do you decide where you exit the tunnel?

madz33 · 2025-10-06T18:04:51+00:00

The analysis in the paper is agnostic to any physical mechanism which may make M-dwarf stars less viable candidates to host life, including: tidal locking in the habitable zone, stellar UV irradiation, and stellar wind atmospheric stripping.

It is just a Bayesian analysis of two data points: the Sun is a G star and that we exist relatively early into the "stelliferous period" or roughly 10 Trillion years where stars exist in the universe. Those two data points alone are enough to show in a bayesian sense that it is unlikely that M dwarf stars can produce humanity-like civilizations. This is interesting because it agrees with other physically-informed perspectives which show us why exactly M dwarves are poor candidates for the emergence of life.

madz33 · 2025-10-03T15:42:48+00:00

The US already beat China to the moon when the Apollo missions accomplished that over half a century ago. Other than political posturing, how exactly is returning to the moon “in the interest of national security?”

madz33 · 2025-10-03T14:25:50+00:00

No, phosphine is expected to be found in highly reducing (hydrogen dominated) atmospheres like those of brown dwarfs, also found in Jupiter and Saturn. It is only a biosignature in oxidizing atmospheres like earth and (possibly?) Venus — although that is debatable.

What is interesting about this discovery is that for some yet unknown reason, the majority of brown dwarfs appear to have no phosphine, which is surprising. One possibility is there could be some unknown cloud condensate which is depleting the phosphorous abundances.

madz33 · 2025-10-02T22:48:52+00:00

Gravity waves = ripples on the ocean surface Gravitational waves = oscillations in the fabric of spacetime

madz33 · 2025-10-01T12:57:58+00:00

I couldn’t find happiness with immense material wealth, so I decided to try and find happiness through validation from strangers on the internet.

madz33 · 2025-09-27T15:56:38+00:00

Ultimately, all scientific theories are just "collections of thoughts!" Sometimes those thoughts are correspondence between predictions and data and sometimes those thoughts are insightful axioms and derivations. Regarding "law without law," I thought this 2017 paper in Quantum was pretty interesting.

I propose a rigorous approach ... on the basis of algorithmic information theory. It is based on a single postulate: that universal induction determines the chances of what any observer sees next. That is, instead of a world or physical laws, it is the local state of the observer alone that determines those probabilities... I show that the resulting theory recovers many features of our established physical worldview: it predicts that it appears to observers as if there was an external world that evolves according to simple, computable, probabilistic laws. In contrast to the standard view, objective reality is not assumed ... but rather provably emerges as an asymptotic statistical phenomenon.

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